I've had the AMD A10 6800K for over the past year now. I've upgraded most of my system including upping my GPU to the MSI R9 390 8G. Now I'm thinking its time for a CPU upgrade. It seems to be becoming the bottleneck in recent games like Witcher 3 and suprisingly Fallout 4..
What does everyone think? Is it time for an upgrade? (waiting for the deals of course)
If you think I should, what should I upgrade to? The top i7's in my opinion are a ridculous price for what they are.. (at the price they are now (£350)) Also, is it worth an upgrade yet? Especially with xen out soon.. I really wish AMD came out with more frequent CPUs then the prices would drop greatly.. OK I'm rambling...
for intel a xeon 1231v3 is really bang for buck. AMD, might as well wait it out for zen. Which is what i'm doing, also waiting for HBM2 cards to come out as well which are scheduled to release about that time.
Well, to be frank, the platform you're working with in general will always be a bottleneck for most modern games, especially the AAA titles. You COULD go with a Athlon 860K just to get you by, but that's really not enough of an upgrade to justify the extra cost of that platform at the moment. If you CAN hold out for a bit longer, see if maybe your 6800K has any remaining overclocking headroom (if you aren't already overclocking the chip), and push the chip as far as you comfortably can. Otherwise you'd be looking at a total platform update.
If you want to keep the platform update cheap and still net stronger performance, you COULD go with a basic LGA 1151 board and grab a locked i5, those chips are only running around 200 bucks for a decently clocked version, and you leave yourself open to the possibility of jumping over to a 6600k or 6700K later on down the line if/when funds allow for it. It's a more sound upgrade path than anything AMD has at the moment since you have several different processors to choose from. Just know that going with LGA 1151 WILL lock you out of Xeon choices, since it's been mentioned that Xeon will NOT be compatible with the consumer boards like they were with Z97, so if you were thinking Xeon for your next CPU then you would currently need to go Z97 with some DDR3 that you could POTENTIALLY re-use from your existing system... which WOULD shave off a tiny bit of the cost of the platform upgrade.
Waiting for Zen is kind of not a thing you should presently be doing unless the upgrade isn't really NEEDED at the moment. The current crop of Intel CPUs is just fine for the foreseeable future, and I don't really know that Zen is going to bring us anything truly revolutionary apart from having a competing solution out there that is largely on par (it can be hoped) with the Intel offerings.
Yeah I agree, there should be no reason to lock out consumer motherboards from using server parts. It is in all likelihood possible for a server environment to use a mainstream motherboard simply BECAUSE they don't need all the extra features or connectivity that a server-grade board offers. I really wanted to move my fiance over to Z170 with a Xeon chip since she doesn't want to/need to overclock, but since that won't be a thing I'll have to wait and see what the hardware landscape looks like as of Q2/Q3 next year.
Id wait until zen comes out. AMD is going back to where they kick ass which is SMT and not CMT... I think we will see a pretty close run between zen and skylake or whatever. If you have to upgrade now Id say go skylake i5 since you clearly value gaming over cores